THE LIVES THEY LIVED; TV Guy

Uncle Miltie was many things, but avuncular was not one of them. A ravenous show-biz animal, Milton Berle was willing to devour the scenery, his second bananas or anything else that stood between him and a laugh. Replay those first 1948 episodes of ''Texaco Star Theater,'' the show that turned him into an overnight superstar (at age 40) and America into a nation of couch potatoes, and you wonder how the country ever fell in love with him.

He kneaded his hands throughout his opening monologues. As each wisecrack landed, the warmth of his grin was canceled out by the shiftiness of his eyes; he'd look just past camera range, as if a network executive were standing there, waiting to give him the hook should a single joke bomb. His physical clowning was likewise more manic than mirthful. No sooner did a seltzer bottle start spritzing than Berle already seemed to be worrying about whatever routine was looming next on the bill. The only time he relaxed was at the hour's end, when he sang his sentimental trademark anthem: ''There's just one place for me,/Near you.'' If Bob Hope thanked us for the memories, Berle was all present tense. He wanted us near him morning, noon and night so that we would never have to rely on anything as unreliable as memory to summon him up for his next gig.

The cruel punch line, of course, is that by the time he died, Berle was largely forgotten by most Americans -- post-boomers too young to have been present at the creation of television and unable to find him even in TV Land reruns. That does not diminish his achievement. When his variety show was first beamed out of tiny Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center by NBC, there were fewer than half a million TV sets in use in America. When he was canceled six years later, there were more than 26 million television households. ''In a fairer world, he would have received a royalty on every TV set ever sold,'' said Larry Gelbart, the comedy writer who as a child first caught Berle's act at the Oriental Theater in Chicago in the late 1930's.

Though he did not have the deepest talent in American entertainment, there may have been no career with more breadth. His life not only spanned virtually the entire 20th century but almost all of its pop culture as well. Who else appeared with both Pearl White in the most famous of silent-movie serials, ''The Perils of Pauline,'' and with Gilda Radner, on ''Saturday Night Live''? Who else worked with both Eddie Cantor and the Muppets, Florence Ziegfeld and Elvis Presley? Even Berle's famously muscular sex life seemed to bookend the Hollywood sensibility of an age; he claimed flings with both Aimee Semple McPherson and Marilyn Monroe.

Born poor in Harlem and pushed forward by a rapacious stage mother who would make Mama Rose look like Florence Nightingale, he began his career as Milton Berlinger, a 5-year-old Charlie Chaplin imitator winning an amateur look-alike contest. A year later, he was appearing with Chaplin himself, along with Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler, in Mack Sennett's ''Tillie's Punctured Romance.'' More silent movies followed, including ''The Mark of Zorro,'' with Douglas Fairbanks. Then came the whole multimedia gamut of pre-TV America: vaudeville (Berle played the Palace just as he entered his teens), talkies, burlesque, Broadway, nightclubs, radio. Working without a break for education or any other distraction, he earned big money and big billing without ever quite becoming a big star.

That changed the night of Tuesday, Sept. 21, 1948. It's hard to overstate just how early ''Texaco Star Theater'' falls in the history of television. While Berle had first appeared in an experimental TV broadcast in Chicago in 1929 (seen by a dozen people, by his estimate), the most mass of mass media was still in its infancy when he grabbed its spotlight nearly two decades later. No one had yet figured out what a TV variety show might look like. No one knew who might watch. No one knew how TV might help a career, and many show-biz potentates feared it could hinder one. Berle jumped in anyway. It was only after he proved that the water was safe that the others followed: Caesar and Benny and Groucho and Lucy.

Berle became ''Mr. Television'' by recycling the detritus of his countless nights on a vaudeville road that had vanished years earlier: slam-bang Smith-and-Dale-style sketch comedy, garish drag shenanigans out of ''Charley's Aunt,'' smart-alecky insult humor. Almost none of it was original. He had long ago been christened ''the Thief of Bad Gags'' (by Walter Winchell, according to legend) for his habit of stealing other comedians' jokes. But he just bulldozed ahead, turning even his reputation for comic kleptomania into a running gag that he milked as shamelessly as the rest of his shopworn arsenal.

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That Berle clicked instantly with the audience wasn't merely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. However ancient his material, he was the first entertainer to have an instinctive grip on the spanking-new dynamics of television. At the start, he dictatorially directed his show himself, often wearing only a Turkish towel and stopping and starting the frantic rehearsals with the police whistle he wore around his neck. Speed was everything, and speed proved a drug for a postwar TV audience used to the less kinetic rhythms of postwar radio and film.

There are several theories why ''Texaco Star Theater'' and its immediate successors, ''The Buick-Berle Show'' and ''The Milton Berle Show,'' had sputtered out by 1956. According to one, Berle seemed funnier when people still had to gather in a neighbor's living room to watch him; once each family had purchased its own TV, the group hysteria of those early audiences was lost. Another theory posits that Berle was done in by the advent of the sitcom or by the competing variety shows that followed in his wake. Sid Caesar's ''Your Show of Shows'' had brainier and more topical humor and Ed Sullivan's ''Toast of the Town'' more glamour. Still another explanation has it, in the words of the critic Steven Stark, that ''Berle had helped sell television to viewers who couldn't stand him.'' As the new medium spread from the Northeast corridor to the hinterlands, an audience arrived that had less affection for a comic persona as unabashedly Jewish as Berle's. All too fittingly, one of the first rivals to inflict ratings damage in his time slot was Bishop Fulton Sheen, sermonizing on the DuMont network. Soon the tube would be the gentile Arcadia of ''Father Knows Best'' and ''Leave It to Beaver.''

But it was, after all, another Jewish burlesque-schooled comic, Phil Silvers at CBS, who finally knocked the Berle show off the air. The biggest problem for Berle may have been that he simply wore the audience out. As he had demonstrated the power of TV to confer instant stardom, so Berle was also fated to be the test case proving that such stardom could have a much shorter shelf life than the equivalent celebrity in other entertainment media. The ubiquity and in-your-face aesthetics of television take a harsher toll than movies on all but the most congenial of top talents. The public that so quickly had its fill of Berle would eventually prove as fickle about countless other No. 1-rated TV comedians, from Caesar to Roseanne. On television, disposability is the norm, longevity the anomaly.

The wonder, and valor, of Berle is that he never gave up. When he lost his own shows, he came right back -- as the host of ''Jackpot Bowling.'' Then came a highly productive career carried out on any screen or stage that would take him, whether as a clown or ''serious'' actor. And I do mean any. The one time I saw Berle in person was at a low point, in the early 1970's, before he arrived at the grand old man status of his final decades. We were both stranded in the greenroom of ''The Joe Franklin Show,'' the lowest rung on New York's talk-show ladder. Franklin kept popping in to deliver bad news: he was bumping Berle further and further back in the night's lineup. Given that the lineup included a lip-synching Elvis impersonator, among other nobodies, Mr. Television was understandably in a rage and wielded his cigar accordingly in the direction of Franklin's face.

But when the time finally came for him to go on the set for his on-air chat, viewers saw none of this -- only an upbeat, relentless comedian tossing a gag into every conversational air pocket he could find. Whether he was funny was almost beside the point. Berle was to television what an electric cord is to a socket, sheer energy the moment someone plugged him in.

Correction: January 12, 2003, Sunday An article about Milton Berle on Dec. 29 in the special Lives They Lived issue misspelled the given name of the vaudeville impresario with whom Berle once worked. He was Florenz Ziegfeld, not Florence.